Does Television Kill Your Sex Life? Microeconometric Evidence from 80 Countries

Adrienne Lucas and Nicholas Wilson

No 24882, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The canonical consumer demand model predicts that as the price of a substitute decreases, quantity demanded for a good decreases. In the case of demand for sexual activity and availability of alternative leisure activities, popular culture expresses this prediction as “television kills your sex life.” This paper examines the association between television ownership and coital frequency using data from nearly 4 million individuals in national household surveys in 80 countries from 5 continents. The results suggest that while television may not kill your sex life, it is associated with some sex life morbidity. Under our most conservative estimate, we find that television ownership is associated with approximately a 6% reduction in the likelihood of having had sex in the past week, consistent with a small degree of substitutability between television viewing and sexual activity. Household wealth and reproductive health knowledge do not appear to be driving this association.

JEL-codes: I12 I31 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: CH DEV EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published as Lucas Adrienne M. & Wilson Nicholas L., 2019. "Does Television Kill Your Sex Life? Microeconometric Evidence from 80 Countries," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 19(4), pages 1-16, October.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24882.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Television Kill Your Sex Life? Microeconometric Evidence from 80 Countries (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24882

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24882

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().